San Antonio received a designation that only three other Texas cities can claim.

San Antonio rock band Buttercup warmed up a downtown crowd that gathered Monday to celebrate a special announcement from the city. The Texas Music Office has designated San Antonio a Music Friendly Community.

Jazz musician Henry Brun will be the volunteer chair of the city’s Arts and Culture Division music committee, and he says he’ll begin by gathering information.

“There’s going to be plenty of input, positive and negative. And we welcome all of it because the only bad input is the input you don’t receive,” Brun says.

That information will be tallied to figure out where the music committee should concentrate its efforts.

“By the end of the year we will have a strategic plan which is going to state our goals and the charge that we’re going to have, as a committee, as a city entity and as a community,” Brun says.

Mayor Ron Nirenberg says he hopes the designation will help focus and propel a business that’s already a major player in the city.

“There’s a billion dollar impact annually from the music industry in San Antonio, and I think that catches most people off guard,” says Nirenberg.

He says one of the city’s unique musical strengths is the multicultural demographic that the other music friendly cities – Austin, Fort Worth and Denton – don’t really have.

“It’s just a part of who we are. In fact there’s probably not a clearer way to demonstrate what kind of city we’ve become in terms of the convergence of cultures, than through our music,” Nirenberg says.

Musician Erick Sanden is hopeful, but also realistic.

“Of course, down in the trenches it falls on the club owners, the musicians, to work together more than anything. We can’t wait for the city to magically come in and make everybody stars. We’ve got to work on our craft and control the things that we control,” Sanden says.